


homesick

by songs



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: M/M, minor trk spoilers, post trk, some ronan introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-17
Updated: 2016-05-17
Packaged: 2018-06-08 22:35:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6876736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/songs/pseuds/songs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ronan would never cage the ones he loves. Ronan would never cage anything at all.</p><p>Ronan <i>is </i>not caged at all, not within the Barns' many, many walls, not in the Barns’ green, eden-fields and fruit-orchards. Ronan is living his dreams, too. Ronan is everything like his father. Ronan is nothing like his father.</p><p>Does that make sense?</p>
            </blockquote>





	homesick

**i.**

 

Ronan dreams of light. Ronan dreams of reflections. In the lake-water he sees his father’s face. In the hallway mirrors he catches the tail-ends of a memory. _Niall Lynch, home from another dream. Niall Lynch, with gifts. Niall Lynch, with baskets. Niall Lynch with stories and luster and wonder._

Ronan wakes with a start. Adam is curled under the bedsheets beside him, head craned, lips feathering along Ronan’s nape. _Ah._ Adam is here, but soon he won’t be. Soon he will be saying _goodbye_ again _,_ the vowels long and airy, crinkled with a mix of yearning and happiness. Because Adam _is_ happy. Adam is living out his dreams. Adam faraway, Adam in college classrooms, Adam in the snowscape, smiling across from a screen. Ronan is happy, too. Ronan loves that Adam is happy.

Ronan loves so many things— Opal, Chainsaw, the Barns, his friends, his brothers. Adam, Adam, Adam. But there’s a divide, a cleft between dreamt and not. Dream things will always stay close beside you. It’s the undreamt world you have to chase. Ronan sees Niall Lynch’s eyes blink back at him in gleaming windows and murky mirrors. But that isn’t quite right, either.

 

 _I worshipped you,_ Ronan thinks, _but I am not you._

 

Ronan would never cage the ones he loves. Ronan would never cage anything at all.

Ronan _is_ not caged at all, not in the Barns' many, many walls, not in the Barns’ green, eden-fields and fruit-orchards. Ronan is living his dreams, too. Ronan is everything like his father. Ronan is nothing like his father.

 

Does that make sense?

 

**ii.**

“When is Adam coming back?” asks Opal.

 

Ronan grunts. “He’s in school. Don’t be clingy.”

 

“What’s _clingy_?”

 

“When you leech onto people when they don’t want you to.”

 

“What’s _leech_?”

 

“Sticking super fucking close,” Ronan translates. “Leeches suck your blood, too.”

 

“But you don’t want to suck Adam’s blood.”

 

Ronan could make a dirty joke here, but Opal is, like, six. So he takes the high road.

 

“I don’t,” Ronan affirms.

 

“But why wouldn’t Adam want you to?”

 

“Want me to what?”

 

“Be close to him. Adam always wants us close to him, right?”

 

Ronan smiles thinly. “Maybe.”

 

Opal is insistent, though, as all children are.

 

She asks, “Right?”

 

**iii.**

Adam comes to the Barns for a long-weekend visit. He and Ronan spend a day in bed and then a day outside in the glens. Ronan still cannot stomach the red of the roses. Adam understands.

 

“Let’s get out of here,” he says, and Ronan lets himself be guided back to the front porch. ‘Here’ is not particularly far from ‘there’. They’re still surrounded by so many ghosts. It’s like Noah’s room at Monmouth. Like any of the rooms at Monmouth, actually. Ronan’s gone there, once or twice during the school year, to pick up a few things, here and there. Gansey’s room is still half-filled. The tiny model of Henrietta glimmers like new. The corners of his ugly-as-shit, pastel polo-shirts peek out from the wooden bureau. Ronan gets this same feeling whenever he enters Matthew’s bedroom, or Declan’s. A lived-in space, with no one living in it.

 

_Are you alright? Being left here all alone?_

Ronan is not alone. Ronan has Adam. Ronan has Opal. Ronan has Chainsaw and the Barns and his friends and his brothers and his parents’ memories, patterned like pearls in his mind, beautiful and gilded with light, _never_ blood, _stop seeing the blood, Ronan. Stop, stop._

 

_Stop._

**iv.**

“What’s it like?” asks Opal.

 

Adam takes a long drink of tea. Then he answers, “What’s what like?”

 

Opal wrinkles her nose. Ronan notices the sharp, canine tooth that pokes out when she pouts. _Vampire. Dream-thing._

“Living where you live,” Opal says, like it’s obvious. “Far away from here.”

 

Adam shrugs, though his expression is pensive. “I don’t know. It’s nice. Cold. But it’s not as good as seeing you two every day.”

 

“Parrish,” Ronan says, grinning, “I’m touched.”

 

“I mean it,” Adam says. “You’re my—” He falters, and shakes his head, like he’d thought better of it. Ronan wishes he would say the rest. “Anyway. It’s not that exciting.”

 

“I’m from a dream,” Opal says.

 

“That you are,” Adam tells her.

 

“Sometimes it feels like I never left.”

 

Adam and Ronan both remain silent.

 

**v.**

“Adam,” says Ronan, on the cusp of sleep.

 

“Mm?” Adam asks. His voice pulses against Ronan’s neck.

 

Before he can regret it, Ronan asks: “What if I stopped dreaming?”

Adam stills, then shifts. He moves so his eyes are level with Ronan’s. He blinks, big and owlish.

 

“What?”

 

“I mean,” Ronan says, “I don’t mean I will. I just meant…”

 

_What if I wasn’t magic?_

_What would that make me?_

_Where would I belong?_

Adam sighs, but it isn’t tired, or grudging. It’s gentle. He leaves a kiss between Ronan’s furrowed brows.

 

He says, “You have a beautiful mind, Ronan.”

 

Ronan shudders. “Shut up.”

 

“You do,” Adam insists. “And dreaming or not doesn’t change that. Remembering your dreams, taking them out into life. That doesn’t change the dreams to start with. You see things other people don’t. It’s not because you were chosen. It’s because you choose to.”

 

Ronan kisses him hungrily, then— breathing the air straight from Adam’s throat. Adam responds gruffly in kind, and Ronan is wide-awake. Ronan is not sleeping. Ronan is not dreaming.

 

**vi.**

The Barns are lovely. The Barns are a dreamscape. The Barns are everything Ronan’s ever longed for. The Barns are where Ronan was born. The Barns are where Ronan’s parents have died. The Barns are where Ronan first kissed Adam, where Adam first kissed Ronan.

 

But—

 

**vii.**

 

When Ronan closes his eyes, he sees Cabeswater. When Ronan opens them, he sees the Barns. Two sides of a coin. Both his, but not.

 

Bravely, or perhaps stupidly, he decides: _Someday,_ _I can do better. I can do better than that. I can do better. I can do better._

 

**viii.**

The next morning, as Adam readies to leave, Ronan lets the realization settle. Adam sways like a music-note, walks elegantly as a story. _Magic. Magician. Cabeswater._ Adam is none of those things, though. Adam is Adam Parrish, and Ronan loves him, fiercely and loyally and without condition.

 

 _I’ll be with you,_ Ronan thinks, but does not say. Not yet. _No matter what, I’ll be with you._

Opal hugs Adam goodbye, then Chainsaw makes an appearance, and the cherry-tree outside lilts in the wind and Ronan leans forward, cups Adam’s face in his hands, and kisses him, soft and furtive, on the mouth.

 

“Ronan?” Adam asks, when he pulls away. But Ronan only shakes his head and smiles. He is calm, sure, deep in his heart of hearts.

  
 

**ix.**

 

Ronan looks at Adam Parrish, beaming in the autumn-light, and thinks, with finality:

 

_You are my home._

**Author's Note:**

> inspired a bit by [ this post on tumblr! ](http://starsandgutters.co.vu/post/144465777493). i have been thinking about ronan's loneliness, staying in henrietta while all his family is elsewhere. i hope this wasn't OOC! while i hope ronan gets to live comfortably in the barns he's missed for so long, i hope someday he and adam do move on and find someplace to call their "own". maybe cabeswater 2.0??? eheh !!! thanks for reading :)


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